In powerful and affecting prose, Debora Kuan offers us a series of linked pieces that juxtapose the openness of childhood with the helplessness of aging family members now facing death. The title of this stunning series, The Ages, alludes to the age gaps between members of the same family, from children to parents to grandparents, and perhaps to the age the speaker has become now that parenthood means not only being a mother but also caring for elderly parents. The Ages as a title reminds me, too, of the idiom “one for the ages,” which speaks to how central the brightness of memory is to being alive, which conversely makes memory loss more disorienting.
Indelible images emerge side-by-side, like the blind finch, with “just black slits where its eyes should be and tufts of black feathers” alongside a friend’s aging family members, in wheelchairs, “chasing patches of sun as the hours passed like echoes.” More than juxtaposition, in The Ages Kuan has figured out a unique prose form that gets at the way that the lives of close family members are not lived out side-by-side so much as totally intertwined. An injury to one is an injury to all. In the opening piece “Florida Omniscient,” for instance, Kuan oscillates the imagery at a sentence-level between the speaker’s kids playing a joyful game with her in the swimming pool and her bedridden father-in-law: “when they reel me in I thrash and flail and pretend to weep my captors haul me up the steps with glee feast on my shoulders and torso he is yelling and swearing as two of the aides try to move him...”
The Ages is indelible writing. Kuan offers many sentences that move me, sentences linked to each other in the same associative way that the prose pieces are linked across The Ages, sentences such as these: “In a fantasy, I imagine the mind having flown south. The mind as migratory. Some days the mind holds still in the wind. Some days it lands inside a word and surrenders to its new form. I, too, become a word. Today: Aching. Ache. The ache.” As a reader, my mind gladly surrenders to Kuan’s new form.
Debora Kuan is the author of three poetry collections, Women on the Moon (The Word Works), Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press), and XING (Saturnalia). Her work has appeared in Time magazine, Poetry, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, ZYZZYVA, and other publications. She is the former poet laureate of Wallingford, Connecticut, where she lives with her family and works remotely for the MIT Press.